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A loud boom has shaken Feilding on Wednesday morning as what appeared to be burning pieces of asteroids flashed in the sky over the Manawatū District.
Kath Hopping said she was sitting outside her house before her morning run about 6.50am when an “explosion in the sky” shook her house and stopped her.
She said it sounded like a gas tanker had exploded nearby, or she thought there could have been an earthquake, but she couldn’t see anything nearby, and went to check her security camera.
The footage showed what looked like a fireball turning clouds into bright orange for a few seconds.
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“I checked the cameras to see if there was anything … and that’s when I saw the explosion in the sky.
“What the hell was that? That was a wow moment,” she said.
Hopping said she was surprised by how many people got in touch with her through social media, sharing their experience of the loud bang, after she posted the video online.
She said she did not have a clue about what could have caused it, but she was sure it was something that happened quickly in the clouds.
“The only thing I could think of is a meteor … it just looked like there was an explosion in the clouds.
Kath Hopping/Supplied
“What the hell was that? That was a wow moment,” Feilding local Kate Hopping says.
“But there is no trail, no indications [of that]. It’s just spontaneous,” Hopping said.
“It was obviously quite widely felt in our district anyway.
“It was just weird, I have never seen anything like that.”
Did you experience the explosion? Email federico.magrin@stuff.co.nz
University of Canterbury planetary astronomer Michele Bannister said it was “wonderful” that more people were noticing fireballs in the sky.
“It’s wonderful people are noticing them more now because we are able to do scientific studies of them as a result of people making these reports.
“So, if people see this kind of events, what we’d ask they do is go to fireballs.nz and report the fireballs for us, because that will help us be able to understand more about how many of these are happening in our skies.
“They would help us understand how the history of the Solar System led to these little worlds travelling near the Earth. And if one of these does come through the atmosphere and leads to the dropping of meteorite help us being able to recover [it],” she said.
Joy Pollard/Supplied
University of Canterbury planetary astronomer Michele Bannister says these events happen on a regular basis, and it was likely to be tiny pieces of an asteroid burning up in the atmosphere.
Bannister said these events happen on a regular basis, and it was likely to be tiny pieces of an asteroid burning up in the atmosphere.
She said Fireball Aotearoa invited people, schools and public buildings to mount cameras on their roofs, record and share these events, as they would help put together the history for the cosmos.
When Bannister lived in Canada she saw a line of fire across the sky, she said, so the people in Manawatū would have enjoyed a “good light show”.
Local Jane Small said she heard the loud boom and felt it.
“I live in Colyton and one of my dogs took off petrified. It sounded and felt like the start of a big earthquake.”
Palmerston North airport spokesperson Olivia Pierre said they had received no reports of anything unusual happening in the sky in that area.
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